Monday, September 12, 2011

Except for Kiss Me, Kate,
no Cole Porter show has been revived as often as Anything Goes, the 1934 shipboard musical he wrote with P.G.
Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Wodehouse and Bolton
penned the original script, about a shipwreck; when the cruise ship the S.S.
Morro Castle went down in a fire weeks before rehearsals were scheduled to
start, marking the worst maritime disaster of the decade. Lindsay, who was also
directing, and Crouse quickly refashioned the plot as a romantic farce about a
young man who stows away on a ship to stop one of its passengers, the girl he
loves, from marrying the man her mother has picked for her and through the device
of a purloined passport ends up being mistaken for a celebrated gangster.

The book of the musical as it was finally produced is peerlessly
silly, though every time it’s mounted afresh on Broadway someone is hired to
tinker with it:the version that is currently intoxicating Manhattan audiences
carries credits to Crouse’s son Timothy and Stephen Sondheim’s sometime
collaborator John Weidman. Even the Porter score gets treated as a work in
progress. All productions include “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,”
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through the Night” and the title tune, and since
the sixties “It’s De-Lovely” from Red,
Hot and Blue and “Friendship” from Du
Barry Was a Lady are common bonuses. The 2011 edition adds “Easy to Love”
(which Porter wrote for the film Born to
Dance) and “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” (from an obscure British play
called O Mistress Mine) while
restoring the often excised “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” “The Gypsy in Me”
and “Buddie, Beware.”

Purists may whine, but it doesn’t seem to make
much difference what tiny omissions and additions script doctors make to Anything Goes or how the Porter
repertoire gets mined, as long as the shape of the original is retained and the
mainstays of the score don’t go missing. After all, it’s not Fiddler on the Roof. The Porter
songbook is rich in variety but the adjectives we might apply to one of his
songs – effervescent, brittle, madcap, flamboyantly witty – would fit any of
the others, and only Kiss Me, Kate
(indisputably his finest score) is so intricately tied to a dramatic context
that its songs can’t be slipped with impunity into other shows. That
said, I think that the creative team behind the newest revival, headed by
director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and music supervisor-arranger Rob
Fisher, has assembled the most pleasing combination of originals and
interpolations yet. And it’s hard to imagine them being performed more
delightfully.

Colin Donnell and Laura Osnes

In commercial terms the raison d’être of this Anything Goes is Sutton Foster, a
musical-comedy star who can manage to be both elegant and raucous. Foster is an
unusual case – a gifted ingénue who’s too much of a powerhouse for standard
ingénue roles. (Her role in The Drowsy
Chaperone– an uproarious parody of an ingénue – was ideal for her mix of
talents.) It’s a stretch to cast her as Reno Sweeney, the nightclub celebrity
whose act, backed by a foursome known as the Angels, is a sexy musical version
of a revival meeting. The part was written for Ethel Merman, so she doesn’t
wind up with the hero, Billy Crocker (Colin Donnell), whom she lusts after but
who treats her as a pal; he wins the blue blood, Hope Harcourt (Laura Osnes),
while Reno lands Hope’s fiancé, the unflappable British peer, Lord Evelyn
Oakleigh (Adam Godley) whom she wooed away from Hope as a favor to Billy.
Unlike Merman, though, Foster doesn’t look a top banana, and since Reno is so much more fun
than Hope, in this production you wait for Billy to wake up and realize he’s
chasing after the wrong dame. (Osnes, who has a lovely soprano, does everything
she can to rescue an irredeemably insipid role.) This puzzlement is a perfectly
acceptable trade-off for getting to watch Foster dance and hear her sing “I Get
a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top” (with Donnell), “Anything Goes” and “Blow, Gabriel. Blow.”

The cast of Anything Goes

Donnell, whose last Broadway credit was Jersey Boys, was new to me, and he
manages the tricky demands of his role – he has to be both straight man and
clown – without breaking a sweat. The whole ensemble is fine, including Jessica
Stone as the girl friend of the real (absent) Public Enemy Number One and
especially the cast’s gleeful veterans. Jessica Walter plays Hope’s mother and
John McMartin is Elisha Whitney, Billy’s permanently inebriated stock-broker
boss, whom he spends the entire cruise evading. These are 1930s
Hollywood-stock-company roles, and you generally don’t take much notice of who
plays them, but Walter and McMartin are hilarious. McMartin, who’s 81, is truly
a marvel. In the televised Sondheim 80th birthday tribute, he sang “The Road
You Didn’t Take,” which he’d introduced in Follies
in 1971, and his performance of this troubling ballad of a man who won’t own up
to the regret that’s eaten him alive was devastating – at least as much so as I
remembered thinking it forty years ago. In Anything
Goes he plays at the other end of the spectrum – pure farce – and his
technique is impeccable. The production’s other special treat is Joel Grey,
still spry as he approaches 80, as Moonface Martin, the third-rate crook who’s
supposed to be sharing quarters with Public Enemy Number One. This trio of
performers (Walter is a mere 70) give the impression of having swindled time.

The show’s star is really Kathleen Marshall, who
adds Anything Goes to a long list of
triumphant revivals of classic musicals (of which I’d single out Kiss Me, Kate, Wonderful Town, and the City Center Encores! renditions of Babes in Arms and Bells Are Ringing). Marshall
approaches a big musical number like “Anything Goes” (the first-act finale) or
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” as if it were a meal with multiple courses, layered and
constantly surprising. And she provides liberal doses of superb tap dancing.
The production is a bliss-out.

After Marshall and Susan Stroman, the
director-choreographer whose work on Broadway musicals I most enjoy is Rob
Ashford. His latest is the fiftieth anniversary revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starring Daniel
Radcliffe. Ashford’s shows perform well at the box office but he doesn’t get
much respect. Last season he staged a stylish, tongue-in-cheek production of
the 1968 Burt Bacharach-Hal David Promises,
Promises that received mixed reviews.

I saw a nifty version of How
to Succeed at the Goodspeed Opera House, home of musicals, in East Haddam,
Connecticut in 2010 and initially didn’t feel the need to see another, but when
Ben Brantley complained in The New York
Times that Ashford’s had some of the same problems Brantley had noted in Promises, Promises, I put it on my
schedule immediately, since I loved Promises,
Promises. Brantley’s responses to musicals are often baffling; he doesn’t
seem to understand how they work, and you always get the impression that he’s
using the wrong search engine on them and then voicing his disappointment when
his search comes up empty. Among other problems, he (and other New York
reviewers) got the two leads in Promises,
Promises backwards: it was Sean Hayes, as the hapless, compromised everyman
hero, lending out his apartment to executives in search of a location for
illicit trysts, who was miscast while Kristin Chenoweth as the object of his
dreams, a secretary in his office whose dead-ended affair with their married
boss (Tony Goldwyn) drives her to attempt suicide, was perfect. (If the plot
sounds familiar, the source material is the 1960 Billy Wilder Oscar winner The Apartment, adapted by Neil Simon.)
Hayes has a pleasant singing voice and a penchant for clownish high stepping;
it’s easy to imagine him in a flibbertigibbet role like Charley in Where’s Charley? or as a fast talker
like Harold Hill in The Music Man. But he’s not
convincing as an ordinary fellow, and if you saw Jerry Orbach in the original
production Hayes’s rendition of “She Likes Basketball” felt by comparison like
a guest spot on a variety show: who could believe that Sean Hayes ever
fantasized about being a basketball player? Still, it was fun to watch him and
Chenoweth together; their pleasure in each other’s company was obvious. And she
was extraordinarily touching, while her touch on the Bacharach-David score was
so light and so sure at the same time that the addition of two of their
standards, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “A House Is Not a Home,” was gratifying.
(You didn’t mind at all that the second of these made no sense in the context of the show.)

It’s logical that Ashford would be drawn to How to Succeed after Promises, Promises. Both involve
immoral shenanigans in an office setting and both are quintessentially sixties
shows, though the tone of How to Succeed
is (lightly) satirical and its plot farcical. Ashford grooves on the synthetic
visual style of the sixties and on the silly, infectious dance crazes, and his
choreography takes advantage of both – as in the lascivious-ironic “A Secretary
Is Not a Toy” number, where one of the execs (Michael Park) lectures the others
with projections and a pointer while the ensemble flies about Derek McLane’s
ingenious set, a series of layered hexagonal spaces. How to Succeed is about an ambitious young window washer named J.
Pierrepoint Finch (Ponty), played by Radcliffe, who uses a manual and his
talents for flattery and insinuation to land a job at World Wide Wickets (WWW)
and then to climb the corporate ladder, and Ashford finds exactly the right
playful tone for numbers like “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” and “The Company Way”
and “Coffee Break,” in which the office goes slightly berserk when the coffee
machine runs out. At the Goodspeed, Kelli Barclay staged “Coffee Break” as a
comic ballet of caffeine jitters; Ashford turns it into a lesson on how
caffeine deprivation can turn civilized adults into desperate savages. (I
assume that the popularity of Mad Men
has made it possible for directors to present the lip-licking randy execs
eyeing their shapely secretaries in “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” without having
to worry that someone will sermonize about how sexist the musical is.)

Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette

When How to
Succeed received its last Broadway revival in 1995, it was so overproduced that it barely seemed human, and Matthew Broderick had an icy comic efficiency as
Ponty that bordered on the unpleasant. But if the book of the musical (by Abe
Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert) allows for a soulless, conniving
Finch, Frank Loesser’s songs redress the balance, and if Ponty isn’t a lovable
conniver the romantic story line featuring him and secretary Rosemary
Pilkington (a deft and affable Rose Hemingway) feels like an add-on. Robert
Morse, who played Ponty on Broadway in 1961 and again in the entertaining 1967
movie, had a great deal of charm, and so does Radcliffe, though unlike the
prodigiously gifted Morse, a speed-freak creation of the Broadway stage,
Radcliffe’s comes largely from his modesty. He’s so game and self-effacing a
performer that one might underestimate the ease with which this untrained singer-dancer
carries a full-scale Broadway musical. Radcliffe plays Finch as so boyishly
sweet that he catches you by surprise every time he scores a corporate hit and
undermines his arch-enemy, the weaselly, entitled Bud Frump (Christopher J.
Hanke), the boss’s nephew. Ponty’s big number is the second-act ballad “I
Believe in You,” delivered to his own image in the mirror in the (men’s)
executive washroom while the other execs hover jealously. It’s a song in praise
of ego and ambition, but Radcliffe makes it about confidence bolstering, and
the impulse to soften it feels right for this performer. He makes only one
mistake, I think: he’s always so distracted in his scenes with Hemingway -
clearly a comic choice - that when Ponty realizes at the end of the first act
that he’s in love with Rosemary you’re not sure how he arrived at that
conclusion. Radcliffe’s true partner in this production is John Larroquette as
WWW’s boss, J.B. Biggley. Rudy Vallee, the original (and movie-verson) Biggley,
was befuddled and ridiculous; Larroquette plays him as ulcerated and not even
vaguely engaged in the affairs of his company, a combo that works just as well.
He’s such a towering physical presence that his scenes with the diminutive
Radcliffe have an almost bizarrely funny Mutt-and-Jeff quality, and some of
Ashford’s choreography for their duet, “Grand Old Ivy,” spins off it.

The cast of How to Succeed

The supporting cast is strong, especially Rob
Bartlett in the dual role of the mailroom supervisor Mr. Twimble and the aging
CEO Wally Womper (Bartlett has some of the vaudevillian goofiness of Eddie Foy
Jr. in the granddaddy of workplace musicals, The Pajama Game), Mary Faber (who plays Rosemary’s pal Smitty as a
hard-boiled dame, a Helen Broderick or Aline McMahon type) and Ellen Harvey as
Biggley’s secretary Miss Jones. (Harvey
also recalls show-biz personalities from an earlier era: she’s a cross between
Lauren Bacall and Betty Comden.) Tammy Blanchard doesn’t quite make Biggley’s
mistress, the ditzy bombshell Hedy La Rue, work, though not from lack of trying
– and I think it’s the writing of the character that’s mainly at fault. My only
other quibble is with the dresses in the “Paris Original” number, which are so
atrocious that you can’t believe that Rosemary, who has some taste, would ever
have bought one, let alone that (here’s the gag) every other woman at the
office party would show up in the same outfit. (It’s the only wrong note in
Catherine Zuber’s wardrobe.)

In Finishing
the Hat, Stephen Sondheim praises Loesser, one of his favorite lyricists,
for the cleverness of the ideas at the heart of songs like “I Believe in You”
and “Make a Miracle” from Where’s Charley? I don’t think that How to Succeed is Loesser’s best score;
Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella and Where’s Charley? are more tuneful and
more memorable. But if the music is second-rank Loesser (with the possible
exception of “I Believe in You”), the lyrics aren’t, and the score has both an
unfailing intelligence and a tonal and thematic unity that most Broadway
songwriters can only envy. And I’ve never liked this show more than in
Ashford’s production.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished
Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts,
where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The
Boston Phoenix and The Christian Century and is the
author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American
Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade;
and High Comedy in American Movies.